< Disclaimer> < Return To Issue Article Index >

Part I This past winter, I had the incredible opportunity to spend 3 ½ months in the Republic of Tajikistan. Even I, one of the most geographically literate people I know, wasn’t even really sure where Tajikistan was located. The following is my “live” blog entry, completed on my Blackberry at various points on my trip. This version is edited somewhat for clarity. Oh my! That seems like a good way to set the stage. The Tajikistan Airlines flight was scheduled to leave Ataturk Airport in Istanbul at 22:10 (I've lost my North American am/pm time clock already). Check-in opens at 19:30, which seemed rather early, until you arrive to check-in and see the process underway. At 19:50, the line was already rather long, and the process seemed to occupy 4 stations - 2 for Economy Class, one for Business Class, and another guy. Let's call them desks 1 through 4. I started in the line for 1 and 2, only to get to the desk to find out I should have been in line 4. Catching on to the elbowing and strategic placement of feet and hips, I eventually made it to the front of line 4, where I bought my ticket, paying with cash. I had been warned – $475, US cash only.

In a last ditch attempt at burger consumption, I pay 7 million turkish lira (US$4.92) for a Whopper at the airport Burger King. That’s the Whopper only price. Then I pay 5 million for a can of Coke, BK being in the Pepsi purveying business here. This place ain't cheap, but they've got to pay for this (big, fancy, empty) airport somehow, and it's fun to be a millionaire for the day.

I emigrate from Turkey, having used my 3 month visa for a total of 7 or 8 hours. (I had arrived in Istanbul around noon, having flown the red-eye from Washington to Frankfurt to Istanbul. At Ataturk Airport in Istanbul, there’s a great hotel attached to the airport. If you have a connecting boarding pass, you can go there without even leaving the secure area of the airport. As I was flying on Tajikistan Airlines, I did not have a boarding pass. This meant I had to pay US$45 for a visa and clear immigration and customs to get to the other part of the hotel in order to sleep for 6 hours.) Lots of fancy duty free shops, selling everything you can think of. Who needs to go to London or Paris when you can get it all here in the airport?

Gate 207 is at the far end of this fancy, mostly empty airport, and I am one of the first to show up. I've become hopeful that the seat assignment on my boarding pass might actually be relevant, in spite of the input of my colleagues to the contrary. Here, they scan your bag and you at each gate, which seems to me like an inefficient approach. No doubt the equipment manufacturer had an "in" with the airport designers. For the first time in my life, my belt buckle makes the metal detector beep. It's chaos as people go back and forth through the scanner, gradually removing bits of clothing like shoes, belts, jackets, etc. Of course, the machine is beeping madly the whole time.

In the waiting room, I meet a Tajik woman who speaks Americanized English - she went to university in Nebraska and now seems to work for the UN Development Program. She is with a friend from Brazil. We all soon meet a Swiss guy who seems to work for the Swiss gov't and is carrying some kind of Flugelhorn. It's over 3 meters long when he puts it together. I feel like calling "Ricola" very loudly.

Suddenly everyone is rushing for the door as if to board, but the staff hold us up while they search for “transit passengers” - these are people who got on this plane in Munich, and got off for a brief pit stop in Istanbul. They want all of them back on the plane first. Meanwhile, we are all jammed up against the doors, jockeying for position.

Then they want business class passengers to board, and then the women, but the men are in the way. According to my new Tajik friend, one of the staff says something about people having no good manners today. She takes advantage of the melee to board.

Even though they kept giving me different boarding passes with different seat assignments, it is now clear that this is a free-for-all. The woman with the two sets of 6 foot fake flowers, vases, and eight large carry-on bags is obviously a veteran of this and gets an excellent spot on board with a couple of friends.

Immediately upon entering the plane (Tupelov-154 - notorious Russian design) through a doorway that comes up to my chest, one of the staff waves me into a seat - a middle seat. The distance from the cushion to the back of the seat in front is less than from my wrist to my finger-tips. Somehow, I jam my bag down to the floor (overhead bins are already exploding with stuff - average number of carry-ons per person seems to have been about 4) and by bouncing around manage to wedge myself in to a seat whose hip room is too small (for me, an underweight tall guy!). For a while, I can't actually get my butt to the cushion - 6 inches to go - due to the fact that I am suspended by my knees and butt jammed up against the seats.

A couple of violent moves and I'm in, but my knees are halfway up the back of the seat in front of me. Eventually, my neighbour toward the aisle and I find a way to both sit kind of sideways with my leg under the armrest

Breaking news - my neighbour has switched places with me - I am now living half in the aisle, with some sign-language suggestions from around me that I should put my legs in the overhead bin. We all laugh. Food comes. Good rolls, mystery meat (probably beef, although I did break my fork on it) with mashed potatoes and vegetables, some kind of shredded carrot salad. Bottles of vodka start appearing from nooks and crannies and some business class food leaks back to the first few rows back here. I do my best to avoid being run-down by food carts.

With dinner over, everyone makes a break for the bathroom, which turns out to be the only place on board that you can smoke. It's at the back, I'm not - things are looking up.

Part II

In Part I, I told you about boarding a Tajikistan Airlines flight from Istanbul to Dushanbe. Now, my arrival in Dushanbe.

The flight from Istanbul arrived in Dushanbe at about 7 am, 50 minutes later than scheduled. Dawn was breaking over the mountains, and it appeared to be a beautiful morning. It was probably about minus 10 degrees Celsius or so.

We descended the stairs of the plane to be confronted by dozens of people just standing around. Behind them was a crazy looking truck-like vehicle towing some kind of trailer that had doors like a bus. Clearly this was our transportation to the terminal. About 75 of us crowded into the trailer, and with a whoosh the doors closed and we took off. Nobody could see out because the windows were frosted over, but we bounced and jostled our way somewhere. The suspension on the trailer had clearly expired many years ago - the ride was something like you would experience if you got a hundred strangers together and packed them into a horse trailer with no suspension and went joy-riding on a logging road in the Canadian Rockies.

Suddenly we stopped and the doors whooshed open. I followed the crowd into a cold concrete building where we all stood around in a room for a while. I had been told to watch for a small room on the right, so I hung around near a few possible doors there along with an American woman who seemed to have the same instructions. Either we would use the door marked "Quarantine - Check Paint" (that's not a spelling error, at least not on my part - apparently they are concerned about diseased paint coming into the country), or a skinny locked door nearby. We waited.

Eventually, the horse trailer brought another load of people and the place started to fill up a bit. Suddenly, the American woman yelled "He's here!" and the skinny door opened. Passing through the door into an empty room with a tiny six inch square window, I saw there was another door, and the man was unlocking it. The second room contained only the tiniest IKEA-like desk and a chair. He sat down and started processing the visa for the American woman. I was fortunate to be second in line, as a large number of people formed a line behind me. When my turn came, I produced my "Letter of Invitation", paid my US$63 for a 31-day visa, and I was done.

I stepped back through the skinny door only to be met by a woman who was clearly not Tajik. She had a cell phone around her neck and she looked cold. She said, "Are you Brad," and with my "yes" gave me a big hug. It was my new boss. We waded our way through the crowd to the immigration gap (it really was just a gap between a wall and a glassed-in booth). The guard borrowed my pen to fill in the part of the form I didn't understand and let me pass. Three steps ahead was the luggage carrousel, still unmoving and vacant.
.
We stood for quite some time, waiting. Eventually, a loud noise and the conveyor came to life. About a dozen bags trickled in at a time, with a significant wait in between. That must be one small luggage cart. Eventually, my bags showed up, and after repeated no's to a "luggage boy", we made our way through the customs door, where I had to put my luggage through an x-ray machine in order to get out of the airport. I never did see the operator actually stop anyone, so I'm not sure what they were looking for. Then, for the first time in my traveling life, there was a person checking to make sure your luggage claim tags (those tags they stick to your ticket or boarding pass that you don't know what to do with) matched the tags on your luggage. And then through the door (and over the 2 x 6 door frame attached to the floor) and into the public area of the airport, which was empty, but for a bank machine. The crowd was outside (it was warmer there than in the concrete building), waiting for people to come out. We walked about 100 metres, and we were at the car.

It was a Lada Niva – a two-door 4x4 built by the Russians. When I was a teenager, Lada set up a distribution network in Canada and we saw a few of them for a few years. The driver loaded up my luggage, the boss said goodbye, and off we went, cutting through traffic made up of brand new luxury cars, beat up Ladas and Volgas, and a Jeep Grand Cherokee. The driver spoke only Russian and Tajik. I speak only English and French. He turned on the radio and we listened to American pop music (don't ask me, it wasn't U2).

He showed me where the office was, the location of a few restaurants close to my apartment, and delivered me to the apartment itself. I was home.
.

Brad Farquhar is a public affairs and democracy consultant from Canada.  He recently spent almost four months working in Tajikistan for an international NGO. Brad can be reached at brad@farquhar.ca.

..

< Send a Letter to the Editor > < Subscribe> < Submit An Article >< Disclaimer>